"When it snows in
Alabama, you meet your neighbors and I met my wife to be in that blizzard,"
Tynes said. "She's given me a snowman for Christmas every year since. We will
celebrate our 18th anniversary this summer."

"The memory that
still sticks in my head from that storm is going to breakfast with my friends
at Waffle House in Tuscaloosa, to discover that they had run out of eggs,
because the commissary truck couldn't reach them. Let me repeat: the Waffle
House had no eggs. That's how bad the storm was."

"Green means the
restaurant is serving a full menu, a signal that damage in an area is limited
and the lights are on. Yellow means a limited menu, indicating power from a
generator, at best, and low food supplies. Red means the restaurant is closed,
a sign of severe damage in the area or unsafe conditions."

"If you get
there and the Waffle House is closed?" FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate has
said. "That's really bad. That's where you go to work."

Remix
the national anthem: An
effort to change
the national anthem to R. Kelly's 2003 hit "Ignition (Remix)" - or, at the
least, to make the White House respond to that possibility - is gaining some
steam.

A petition created
on March 3 on the White House's "We the People" petition site requests that we
drop Francis Scott Key's "Star Spangled Banner" in favor of "Ignition (Remix)".
If the petition
gets 100,000 signatures, the White House will have to respond to it, like they
did to a petition that
demanded construction begin on a Death Star by 2016.

The petition reads:

"We, the undersigned, would like the Obama administration to recognize
the need for a new national anthem, one that even a decade after its creation,
is still hot and fresh out the kitchen. America has changed since Francis Scott
Key penned our current anthem in 1814. Since then, we have realized that after
the show, it's the afterparty, and that after the party, it's the hotel lobby,
and--perhaps most importantly--that 'round about four, you've got to clear the
lobby, at which point it's strongly recommended that you take it to the room
and freak somebody. President Obama: we ask you to recognize the evolution of
this beautiful country and give us an anthem that better suits the glorious
nation we have become."

The petition
currently has 10,200 signatures, which is pretty good for nine days, but they
need about 89,700 more signatures to get a response from the White House.

Can't imagine what an R. Kelly national anthem would be like? You don't
have to. This video will show you:

Traffic and weather: Today
will be sunny with a high near 59, starting off a series of sunny days in store
for Birmingham. Here's
your complete forecast.

What to do in Birmingham today: Head
over to Birmingham-Southern College's Bruno Great Hall tonight at 6 p.m. for a
panel on Civil Rights today. On the panel: moderator Odessa Woolfolk, Scott
Douglas, Isabel Rubio, Mayor William Bell, Carolyn McKinstry, Howard Bayless,
and Judge Helen Shores Lee.

Watch this: This
guy took a piece from a big-screen projection TV, the Fresnel lens, and mounted
it on a rotating frame, creating a solar-powered thing exploder. The lens,
which is basically a gigantic magnifying glass, boils water in seconds,
immediately sets wood on fire, melts stacks of pennies, and makes bottles
explode.

The Boost is curated five days a week by
Madison Underwood. Send tips, comments, suggestions, and insults to munderwood@al.com.